Massive Increase in Valve Trade Ban

...isn't that the point? Valve gives you the boot and if you want your things back then you have to make a new account and rebuy everything if you really want. I don't think Valve has a problem with that.

I don't think limiting what you can PURCHASE in the store is reasonable, honestly. It's one thing to ban someone's trade. Yeah they screwed up and deserve to lose that privilege but seriously? destroying their account so they have no way of ever getting new games or DLCs to games they already own, is a bit severe, in my opinion. Even IF they are a scammer.

Here in America are we given the death penalty for stealing? Hardly. Closest thing would be if you ran a ponzi scheme like Madoff, then you get life in prison...

Valve is basically giving accounts the death penalty.

In America they also give death penalty to innocent people...do not forgive that fact eh eh

The number of carded keys (TF2 and Dota 2) coming into the economy is shocking. It's not surprising if Valve is cracking down on it.

If you buy keys for cash...

• I'd strongly suggest never buying keys from anybody who has a private backpack, or anybody who is selling them out of an alt account instead of their main account. (IMO, the only possible exception could be if the person is a trusted seller/or admin of a major, reputable site)
• Take a few minutes to look at the trading history of anybody selling large quantities of keys. Is there anything odd about the account's history? Check profile comments, TF2OP trading history, SOP trading history, etc. For example, if their trading activity only started 2 weeks ago, then think about it: how did they get all those keys? Ask them.
• Basically, if you're doing cash trades for keys (or any other store-purchasable currency items, like tickets), you should check for obvious warning signs, like scammer tags, pending steamrep reports, and brand new accounts, but then look a bit more closely after that, because carders know how to make a mule account look superficially legit. This can help you avoid Gabe's big ban hammer.

I have in fact done some reasearch about this since the first trade bans happened together with a few friends from both SR/SOP TS/TF2OP admin and some rather huge traders, they can mention themselfs if they wish.

However so far as we figured out there is 3-4 carders who is spreading these keys, they sell to suppliers for around 1.05$ pr key, or even lower, who then sells for 1.15$-1.25$ to people either on SOP or on TF2OP huge bulk deals that then sells/trades it away for whatever they feel like. Hell even when thier "suppliers" gets banned they just give them a new account with 1500 keys as a "sorry" for getting banned, this happend to two people i know.

Now Valve dosnt have the tools fully to find every single account who is in this or every single supplier, so they take the heads they can see, which sometimes hits innocents and sometimes they get the major suppliers.
If you belive you are one of these innocent who has been hit by this, it can happend, i would suggest you get either on the phone or write them right away and tell them everything about any keys you have gotten within the last 2 weeks and any trades during that period of time.
This is a unending fight, due to the major profit in TF2 Keys and the major demand for keys, i am a rather larger trader myself and i get 40-50 requests for keys everyday so yea would be simple to find a supplier and buy bulks just for some easy cash and that is where the problem is Greed over Reason. If people wanna get rid of these people you have to get rid of greed which is impossible in human nature.

However as PotatoPotato (love your name btw) says above, if you wanna be damn sure dubble check who the people are, go on OP and see if they have other trades up, see if they have multiple years on steam, check thier played count on TF2, check steamrep and check SOP rep if they ONLY have key sales in thier rep thread then avoid them.
This being said even the old traders have been cheated into buying keys from these people now and then, some of the profiles they use looks very legit so IF it happens you get suspect report it to valve or another admin of whatever community your part of and let them look into it.

Great that Valve is doing a bit more

* Zyddie: Tons of "old traders" are tags waiting to happen, you would be surprised how many high value bp's got that way by dealing with nasty people, and if you review SR tags over the last year, a lot of them have fallen (while many are still below the rader), however all time and tide etc....

Oh i know that VenGanZa no doubt, i also know 100% which old traders i am not trading with as 60-90 % of thier inventory is from brokers or duped or even worse, so i am aware of that ^^ Been around for a long time just had a break on 8 months =P.

However the community in whole needs to change for this problem to end, this wont end with 100/150 bans, will be way higher. It is lovely to see that valve is finally catching up to the people that is part of it however a lot of people buy from the "old traders" as they are trusted and have a lot of rep, but we also all know that you do not get rich by playing the rules 100%. I know myself that sometimes i should have checked better and even i have fallen for the key s✿✿✿ and will prob get a trade ban for a period of time for it, however i have also been upfront and reported it to Valve when i found out that supplier had tainted keys and changed my entire trading rutine now, more work but for the same amount of profit ^^

However question is how far Valve is gonna go for this, are we gonna start seing some of the higher repped people admins and so on getting trade bans for stuff that happend 3-4 years ago ? or is valve simpley taking the heads of the beast they see now ?.
That is the real question.

I hope Valve punishes each and every person who flagrantly breeches rules, and I hope that they are sensible enough to not inconvenience any legitimate traders

Cant get one without the other

I'm still not entirely convinced that valve would permanently trade ban people for buying a few charged back keys via paypal

I Highly doubt they will cause even me i think I've been screwed once buying carded keys, I'm not sure about that atm but i'm quite sure my supplier had a supplier selling his keys for very cheap and in a bulk, I saw quite late that he sold like 2 or 3000 keys in like 2 days...
Obvious?
...waiting for this to be cleared and managed.

I got my account blocked 2 days ago, I sent a e-mail, and called valve, they just un-locked me.

Valve blocks everyone down the line when they deal with carded purchases. They then work backwards to determine who was in on it (even if just suspected) and who can be unbanned. I have been banned for 2 weeks, submitted my proof and they unbanned me. I slowed down drastically in my paypal trading so I seem to be ok but generally when there was a wave of keys carded I always got involved or my supplier got involved even though we both pay honestly to the sellers. The problem here is that many people sell from clean accounts to obvious "dump" accounts who resell to us. I buy in small volume from newer accounts but stick to the known sellers when it comes to large volume. Seems to keep me under the radar. If you are involved in a $5 incident you wont be looked at with magnifying glass, but if you are involved in a large financial transaction via paypal, rest assured that it will be VERY VERY hard to unlock your account and you will probably one of the last to get unlocked if that at all.

It's not a few keys. It's thousands of keys, like Zyddie and Oz' dak1ne said. It's so bad that if you have some recently-traded TF2 or Dota keys in your inventory, many of them were probably carded, IMO

The carders want to move the keys out fast, before the account gets detected. And, unlike normal traders, their profit margin is enormous, so they don't feel any pressure to wait to squeeze an extra US0.10 out of a sale. It's more efficient for them to spend their time of the other parts of their 'business', not haggling over a few cents.

Therefore, they're not going to trade with every little trader who wants 5 keys or 10 keys. They just make the price really low, like Zyddie described, and sell hundreds at a time to key supplier/resellers, within an hour or two of buying them from the store. Then those secondary resellers increase the price and sell them or trade them more slowly, breaking them down into smaller batches usually. Depending on the resellers' price, there may sometimes be a third wave of resellers who raise the price a bit more. Then the keys move on to the next level where they're being traded for items.

The whole big scam depends on spreading the keys out quickly into a crowd of 'innocent' traders so that it becomes difficult for Valve to delete them or reverse trades.

I guess Valve is getting tougher with the resellers and smaller traders because they can't react fast enough to stop the carders, so they are forced to punsih the people who are facilitating the scam by dealing in the keys. The difference in price between recently carded keys and 'legit' keys with some trading history is very small (US$0.10-US$0.25), which suggests that the market doesn't (yet) see much risk in buying carded keys.

Some of the key resellers know what they're doing, but some of them are just naive or believe some convenient myths, e.g. like keys are much cheaper in the Russian store, or Russian game traders make a 100% profit margin and are such nice guys that they give their profit away by selling keys cheap

Even carded keys have been bought through tf2shop... I mean that's what I'm quite sure, so many carded s✿✿✿s have been spread around and even with "trusted" sellers and reputable sellers.
I have bought some (60) keys, the price was not so low 1.25 usd and really thought it was not obvious and clean and now seeing that the seller is selling a huge amount of keys per day makes me really think he is a part of that carded s✿✿✿s even without knowing well or not this system.
So I really hope this will be managed and investigated quickly.


PS : My avy grew up and listen to music hell yeah

afaik, one still has to wait 3 days b4 being able to trade store bought items.

That is true however it takes a bank upto 5-7 work days before the card is closed completely off, so that still gives them quite some time to abuse it and no problems waiting those 3 days which kinda sucks.

I think the 3 day wait is only for untrusted accounts. It's confusing because the in-game Mann Co store still says 'items become tradable after a few days', while the newer browser version of the store (http://store.teamfortress.com) is saying the same item is 'Tradable: Yes'.

The official wiki says "Upon purchase, they (Keys) are immediately tradable, provided the user's first Steam purchase was more than 30 days ago. Otherwise, a 3-day waiting period is imposed."

There's very clear evidence which shows keys being traded out of carders accounts almost immediately. And I also believe this is happening because I've heard stories of accounts being hijacked and then used specifically to buy a pile of keys and trade them to a mule account (nothing was stolen from the hijacked account). I assume the carders did that because the account was already trusted, it had no 3-day waiting period, so they could move the keys out fast.

I've also seen a case where an old account was hijacked (or purchased) by carders and there was this strange pattern of activity: the name changed and then nothing happened for 30 days, and then it began trading carded keys. I assume the carder made a small legit purchase to start the clock on getting trusted status, waited 30 days and then went crazy with somebody's credit card number.

If that is true PotatoPotato it is easy to fix this problem, put 5 days waiting period on keys for trades. And we get a end to the problem, true it sucks for those who legit buys keys to trade with no doubt, but right now we need the community to be safe again so we only have to worry about stupid scammers and not all be in risk coz a few people did flood the market with keys via stolen accounts/credit cards.

A waiting period discourages normal people from buying keys in the store for trading, so Valve might lose some money there. But, OTOH, Valve also is losing money from carding, since they 'give away' free keys that they could have sold for $2.50. Is it possible that maybe the Steam Community Market makes them think differently about that loss, because they now make money from trading volume, unlike before, and they can earn 15% many times from the same key, even including keys which were originally stolen from them by carders?

But anyway... I just really don't know why Valve doesn't have a waiting period, because it seems like something to try. Valve's not stupid . If they're not making a longer waiting period for key traders, I assume they must have a reason...

I wonder if even 5 days would be enough time to catch them, and maybe that is one reason why not. It seems to me that some accounts selling carded keys are active for longer than five days, but I don't really know if those are ever the original buyers, or just resellers.

BTW, just having a waiting period on keys would not be enough to get rid of the problem totally. Carders can also buy TOD tickets, backpack expanders, gift wrap etc. The profit and market may be smaller, but its still free money. Actually, TF2WH has some of those other items which were probably sold to it by carders, like TOD tickets. I guess because the price TF2WH pays for keys is not very good, so carding something like TOD tickets is an option in that case.